Toybrain Returns Again

I found a motor driver chip that looks promising. It does not support easy (solderless) swapping of the motor drivers, but I’ve also had a bit of a shift in my use case. I’m still looking to lobotomise and re-animate children’s toys, but I’m doing it for swarm robotics on the cheap, so being small outweighs replacing the motor driver chips.

The IC is the TI DRV8830. It is a 1A single-channel MOSFET H-bridge with an I2C interface and automatic current limiting. The automatic current limiting makes it very hard to blow the driver by overloading it, so I don’t have to worry about replacing the drivers as much.